


And I Have Loved You

by orphan_account



Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types, Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-11
Updated: 2015-04-11
Packaged: 2018-03-22 10:08:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,710
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3724909
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He loved her in every way he knew how. But she never noticed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	And I Have Loved You

**I.**

Mr. Abernathy never passed back tests individually. He always just set a stack of them on the desks of the kids that sat in the front seats, and they passed them back to everyone else in their row.

Peeta always thought that was kind of a dick move, since that meant that everyone’s scores were on display to a few people. It was only made worse that the kids who happened to rule the front row in his algebra 2 class were assholes. Really smart assholes.

Of course, Peeta also had the misfortune to have a front-of-the-row seat. He always tried really hard not to look at all the other scores, but getting an eyeful of scores and wrong answers every time ended up being inevitable. He pulled his test off the top and handed the rest of the stack to the girl who sat behind him, but he knew that his eyes had lingered too long on the test that belonged to her. Long enough to pick up details. Like how awful her handwriting was, small and cramped, with the letters blurring into each other. And that the entire front page of her test was covered in red marks, including a glaring 47 on the top.

When the stack landed on her desk, he heard her sigh loudly. It wasn’t a “disappointed, but whatever” sort of sigh. It was genuinely sad, slightly angry sigh.

He turned around in his seat and looked back at her. It was the first time he had really seen her, even though they had been in this class together the whole year, and he tried not to look too long, but…she was pretty. Like, _really_ pretty. Even when she was wearing a baggy black hoodie zipped up to her throat, had her hair falling over her eyes, and looked like she was close to tears.

“Hey, don’t worry about it,” he whispered.

Her head snapped up and she glared at him. Shit. This was none of his business.

“I’m sorry,” he quickly backpedaled, but her gaze was already softening, and she hung her head again.

“It’s okay. Just—this is the fourth test I’ve failed this quarter. I’m barely getting a C in this class,”

“Oh. I’m sorry,”

“You already said you’re sorry, it’s not even your fault,”

“I know—but, that sucks, it really does,” His eyes flicked down to her paper, and he tried to read upside-down so he could decipher the name written on the line at the top, “Kat—Katniss, is it?”

“Um, yeah,”

 “Well, look, I don’t want to get bother you or anything. Just—this is a tough class. I mean, I bombed a few tests at the beginning of the year, too. Just—let me know if I can help you, okay?”

She craned her neck and looked at his paper, then shook her head, “You could stop wrecking the curve in this class,”

“Oh,” he stumbled, for the first time in his life embarrassed over getting a 93. Who the hell was he to be telling her this class was hard? “I’m—I’m not even that smart, at least not compared to everyone else in this class. And—I, uh, studied a lot last week, I--”

“Relax. I’m just messing with you,” she laughed and then sighed and leaned back, shaking her head, “God, I don’t belong in this class. I suck at math, anyways,”

“Why don’t you drop down?”

“I was supposed to be, but my guidance counselor wanted to me to ‘reach for the stars’,” she trilled her voice higher at the end and shook her head.

“You have Ms. Trinket?” he asked, and she nodded, “That was a pretty good impression, actually,”

“Well, at least I’m good at _something_ ,”

“Hey, I’m sure you’re good at a lot of things,”

“Pass the tests back, please, the bell’s about to ring!” Abernathy barked from the front of the room, “We’ll go over these tomorrow,”

As Katniss handed the rest of the row’s tests to Peeta, she whispered, “I’m really not at many things, you know,”

He shook his head, “Hey, you know how to get to the Smoothie King from here, right?”

“Yeah, of course. Why?”

“Because you’re meeting me there after school today, and we’re going to figure out what you’re good at,”

She rolled her eyes, and for a minute he feared that he’d gone too far. Did she think he had asked her out? Okay, maybe he wouldn’t mind if she thought he had, but wasn’t that kind of a bad first impression to leave?

The bell rang over the intercom, shrill and rattling, quickly accompanied by the sound of jabber from the students and chairs scraping against the floor as everyone pushed out their chairs and stood up.

But underneath all the noise, Peeta could hear one small whisper.

“I’d love to, Peeta,”

He hadn’t even known that she knew his name.

**II.**

She wasn’t answering his texts.

With anyone else, that wouldn’t bother him.

But this was Katniss, and Katniss never left his texts unanswered for more than ten minutes.

“Anything else can wait, my Peeta can’t,” she had once said when he asked her. It was a joke, but it still stirred something to hear her say that he was _hers_.

And now she just wasn’t picking up.

He tried not to let it bother him, he really did. He put his phone on the corner of his desk and tried to focus on studying for his final the next day, but his next test was in psychology, and he knew it would be entirely multiple-choice questions over vocabulary he’d had memorized weeks ago. He tried to read a book, but he couldn’t get past two paragraphs without picking up his phone, unlocking it, and then locking it again. He opened up his computer, but he’d already caught up on all the TV shows he had downloaded, and he didn’t really feel like starting something else.

Fuck it. He had a license now, he didn’t have to sit around and wonder what she was doing. He could find out myself. He got up from his desk, grabbed his keys, and walked out of the house and to his car.

He went through the fifteen-minute drive to her house in silence, knowing that music would just annoy him now. When he pulled up to her house, he parked in the empty driveway, knowing right away that her mom was probably at work. Not that she paid any attention to him when he was here. When she wasn’t on shift at the hospital, she was locked in her office upstairs, working on her master’s thesis. It was obvious why Katniss had learned to fend for herself over the years.

When he got to the door, he knocked and waited. Nothing. He did it again. And then a third time. He even pressed on the doorbell, even though he knew it had been busted for months. Finally, he just opened the door and walked in. He froze as soon as he was inside.

The house is chaos. It was always far from the organized, color-coded routine of his own house. It wasn’t uncommon for the Everdeen woman to leave clothes on the carpet, or bowls in the sink for weeks, or for Katniss to find her history report tucked behind her little sister’s bed. But currently, it was just a flat-out mess.

There were papers all over the coffee table, and a few were being blown all over the floor by the manual fan in the corner, which is barely fixing the heat in the house. There were a random pieces of clothing strewn over the carpet, not just a few, but giant piles, and there was music blasting from upstairs, making the walls vibrate.

Katniss was standing at the bottom of the steps in a gray tank top and a pair of cut-off shorts, loose hairs flying out of her braid. A plastic laundry basket was tucked under her arm and she was trying to scream over the music.

“Prim! Prim! Turn that shit down! Jesus Christ!” she groaned in frustration and whipped away from the stairs. She met Peeta’s eyes as she turned and she didn’t even have time to look surprised before she snapped, “What the fuck are you doing here?”

He felt like an idiot, standing there in her doorway, with no logical reason to explain exactly why he was here.

_Yeah, obviously it’s some big fucking emergency_. _Or she was just too busy to pick up her damn phone, you moron, get over your damn hero complex._

“I—you weren’t answering my texts, I got worried,” he sputtered, and she just shook her head.

“I wasn’t answering your fucking texts? Wow, I wonder why!” she slammed the basket on the laundry table that was set up in the hallway, right next to the doorway to the extra room where her mom kept the washer and dryer. She yanked a pair of jeans out and threw it inside the washer, “My mom fucking forgot see needed me to do laundry. So she told me to do it today. _Today._ I have a god damn pre calc final tomorrow, I don’t have time to do everyone’s fucking laundry, especially when my sister decides to throw in everything after one. Fucking. Wear. PRIM! TURN. THAT. DOWN.”

“Hey. Katniss. Stop for a minute, okay? I’m going to get you some water,” He went into the kitchen and grabbed a glass from the overhead cabinet and quickly filled it with water from the tap. He came back into the room and handed it to her, then put a hand on her shoulder, “Sit down for a little bit, okay?”

“No. I have to—“

“Listen to me. It is one thirty in the afternoon. You have all day to do this, _and_ study _and_ rest. Okay? Now sit down. I need to run out to my car real quick,”

Katniss shrugged his shoulder away but still went over to couch and sat, taking a long sip of the water he’d brought her. Peeta went back out to his car and found his headphones—the nice, high-tech, professional-level quality ones he’d gotten for his seventeenth birthday—and took them back inside. He went back into the house, passing right by where Katniss was sitting, drinking water with her eyes closed, and went upstairs. He opened the door to Prim’s room and poked his head in. Katniss’s little sister was laying on her head, reading a magazine, and blasting some bubblegum boy band song off of her alarm clock speaker. She looked up when she heard the door open.

“Peeta, God, knock, will you?”

Peeta sighed, “Prim. Hey. Cut your sister some slack, today, okay? She’s a little stressed out. If you want to destroy your hearing, at least use these,” he tossed her the headphones and they landed on her pink and purple comforter, right in front of her. She picked them up and her eyes widened.

“Wow, these are the ones that are better than Beats! Thanks!”

“You’re welcome. Consider them a loan until your sister’s done with finals. Just promise you’ll use them, okay?”

“Yeah, I will,” she quickly took her iPod off the speaker and plugged it into her newest acquisition, then pulled the headphones over her ears and went right back to her magazine.

When Peeta went back downstairs, Katniss was sitting in the same spot, but she’d put the now-empty glass on the table and had her eyes open, although her head was planted firmly on the back of the couch.

“I gave Prim my headphones, so hopefully that’ll help with the noise,”

“Why the fuck did you give her those? She’ll just break them,”

“Will you go with it if I say anything for a friend?”

She grimaced and closed her eyes, “God, you’re a sap. Well, thanks for the water and the noise control, but I really gotta get that load in,”

“No, stay there. I can get it,” he was already over at the laundry table, reaching for more clothes to put in.

“No, Mom’s gonna kill me if I don’t do it,”

“Your mom’s not home. She’s not going to know. Just stay put,”

He turned the water on and got the soap off the top shelf, filling up the cap and pouring it into the machine. He reached for the plastic laundry basket and dumped some of the clothes inside, his eyes locating the fabrics he’d become familiar with over the last year and a half of their friendship. He recognized the red and white stripes in Prim’s favorite shirt, the pale blue of Katniss’s favorite jeans and the bright cartoon print of her mom’s extra work scrubs. A few more intimate things slipped past—the white and pink lace lining a bra or a pair of underwear —and he tried to avert his eyes before he quickly shut the top of the machine. He turned back to her, and saw she was staring vacantly at an open notebook on the table.

 “Katniss,” he said softly, “Can you tell me what the standard form of a hyperbola is?”

She lifted her head and blinked, “Huh?”

“C’mon, you know this. Tell me what is it,”

“Um..it’s x…well, it could be x or y, but if x is the major axis, than that’s first, minus h, which is the x-coordinate of the center…”

“Good, keep going,”

“And, uh…that’s over a squared, and a is one half of the major axis...and then minus y minus k over b squared, and it equals one,”

“And how to you find the foci?”

“With c.  And b squared equals c squared minus a squared,” she looked up and blinked, “I—shit, I think I got that right,”

“Yeah, you did. See? You got this, no problem,” he tucked the shirt he was folding into the basket next to him, “Now what about the equation for asymptotes?”

“Uh…I don’t think I remember that one,”

“Okay, then study it. I’m going to be right here, you can ask me something if you need it. And if finishing your laundry for you, this is just fucking ridiculous,”

She shook her head, “Don’t do that for me, Peeta,”

“I want to. I like helping you. And if you’re studying while I’m working, you can have some free time this afternoon,”

“Oh, really, free time for what?”

“To catch up on all the Netflix you haven’t gotten to watch all over the last week,”

“That sounds incredible,” she sighed, “God, thank you. You have no idea—shit, you have no idea how awesome this is, really,”

“It’s no problem, really,” he mumbled.

He watched the clothes tumble around in the machine while Katniss studied her notes.

 “Hi, sorry I’m late!”

Peeta lifted his head and smiled as Katniss jogged into the third period physics class they shared, pulling her backpack off her shoulder as she got closer to her lab table. As she sat down, the peach-colored skirt of her dress rode a little higher up her tanned thighs, and Peeta quickly peeled his eyes away.

_Not cool, dude, not cool._

“Nice of you to join us, Miss Everdeen,” Mr. Thread, the long-exhausted head of the science department, sighed from the front of the room as he continued writing on the board, “Just get out your notes, and then I’ll forgive your tardiness. Again,”

“Sorry. I had to pick something up,” she apologized. Thread just grunted and didn’t look back.

Peeta knew what she’d been picking up. He knew even before she turned to make eye contact with him and pulled three things out of her bag: a giant bottle of Gatorade, a box of protein bars, and a rolled-up paper that he knew was the poster he’d drawn last night and stuck inside her locker this morning, along with the other treats. It was the formula for his typical “day-of-a-field-hockey-game” gift to her. She mouthed “Thank you” across the room and he returned a mouthing of “You’re welcome” before Thread finally turned to face the class and they had to pay attention.

But Peeta was just happy she’d liked it. Of course, she always liked the things he gave her, but it was nice to make sure.

He’d been leaving her little things since their senior year had started back in the fall. Not just sport drinks and snacks, which he got for her every game day. He would be at CVS after school getting toothpaste and a gallon of milk and would brush his hand over the candy shelves at the checkout and not even realize he’d picked up her favorite flavor of gum or a packet of her beloved Reese’s cups until he got home and dumped out the contents of the bag on his bed.

After so many rounds of these subconscious buys, it stopped being an accident and instead became a game of what he could get her. Nothing ever went over five bucks, so he could write it off and tell himself it wasn’t a big deal. But he went back to the drugstore nearly every Friday and would get something small for her. A pack of hair ties when she complained that they always disappeared in her bag. A random paperback book or DVD from one of the discount shelves. Some jokey-looking prank gift from the novelty aisle. Or just candy. That was his default.

Sometimes he put a little more thought into his purchases. On days she slid into homeroom complaining about how she hadn’t had time to eat breakfast, he would cut into his free period to go buy her a burger and would leave the take-out bag in her locker. No note. She would know.

On the days of homecoming and winter formal he’d actually had the balls to give her a rose. A yellow one. Yellow for friendship. And she’d loved it. He had decided that he’d give her a bouquet when he went over to her house for an anti-prom movie night at the end of the year. Not just yellow ones, though. Pinks and whites too. Maybe even a red. Or an orange if he could get his hands on one. 

When he thought about it, he realized that he had probably ended up shelling out quite a lot over the last couple years to get her so many little things, but he didn’t care. It was stupid, but buying her a Crunch bar filled him with a hundred times more satisfaction than buying a new computer or something equally expensive for himself ever would.

He sat through the rest of the lesson with detached interest, and the bell rang in the middle of Thread informing them when their next test would be. Peeta jotted down the date quickly, than started to pack up the rest of his things. Before he could even shove his notebook into his bag, Katniss was over at his table.

“You’re the best, you know that?”

He smiled and zipped up his backpack, throwing it over his shoulder, “I’ve only left you the exact same thing, what, a dozen times by now?”

“Yeah, but, still, I’m kind of shocked you keep doing it. So, thank you,” she shifted her bag on her shoulders as they walked out of the classroom, “You’re going tonight, right?”

“To your game? Hell yeah. It’s only, what, two hours away?”

“ _Yes._ You always go to the away games, too. You’re like a super-friend. I need to give you gas money one of these days,”

“Don’t worry about it. It’s money well spent, really. Just go enjoy your heavily caloric protein bar,”

“You bought it for me, don’t tease,”

“Yeah, because I know you’d whine if I didn’t get you anything that wasn’t chocolate chip peanut butter fudge flavored,” he laughed. They’d reached the end of the hallway, and they needed to split paths so she could go to math and he could go to English, “I’ll see you at lunch?”

“Yeah. Sure. You know I’m eating with the team, though, right? Game-day pump-up and all?”

“Yeah, of course. I’ll just say hi. And I’ll see tonight,”

She gave him a smile before she went off to her class. He shook his head as he went his own way, trying not to think about how he could have given her more, just this once.

**IV.**

 “Peeta,” she whispered, the laughter barely staying out of her voice despite how serious she was trying to be, “Did you know Stonewall’s sells diamonds?”

He chuckled and crumpled the empty popcorn bag between his hands, “ _Exquisite_ diamonds,”

“But diamonds are nothing compared to what you can give for free…”

“ _Love_ ,” they said in unison, and then laughed as the familiar ad, complete with its clichés and gaudy engagement rings, faded off the screen and was replaced with an equally overplayed advertisement for a local physical therapy service.

They’d seen the jewelry ad close to a hundred times. It played at least twice before every showing at the downtown theater, and at least five times in between showings.

And that’s where they were right now. In between showings, wasting their Saturday away in a dark, air-conditioned, and currently empty theater.

Although either of them would hesitate to say they were wasting time.

The first time they’d been to the theater, which was the only place in a two-hour radius that played independent releases, it had been the first day of winter break, back when they were sophomores. Despite being underage, they’d wanted to see something R-rated. At any other theater they wouldn’t have even been able to finish asking for the tickets before someone threw them out. But the college kid working the counter that day had obviously been stoned and had told Peeta that he “had the vibe of a man who can appreciate real fucking art.”

They’d gotten in with free popcorn and had gone every weekend something new was out since then. The staff didn’t even bother to reprimand them for clearly breaking the double feature rule. Peeta always managed to pay them for all the showings and bags of popcorn they went through before they left.

The movies here were great. But the best times were the hours before the next showing, where they could just talk, their words protected from the outside, absorbed only into the velvet curtains on the sides of the theater and into the other’s ears.

“How long do we have until the next show?” Katniss ask, stretching her legs over the seat in front of her. Peeta got his phone out of his pocket and checked it.

“Maybe an hour and a half. Do you want to get something to eat?” They’d already finished off three bags of popcorn between the two of them, but it was almost seven, dinnertime, and if Katniss had any weakness, it was the Chicago-style pizza across the street.

“Not today, I’m good,”

“Really? Not even for a slice at Sal’s?” he teased, “It’s Saturday, they’ll have the artichoke pizza on the house,”

“Ugh, that sounds good. But no. I’m not that hungry. And we’ll lose our seats, anyways,” she rolled her neck and blinked slowly, staring at the screen in front of her. The other ad had ended, and the screen was now covered with a rainbow gradient, and canned jazz music played in the background, “Peeta, tell me about a movie. The best movie ever made,”

He chuckled. This was her favorite game to play. To listen to him create another storyline, from scratch, despite having already seen so many stories play out in front of her in this very theater.

Every time she wanted to play, he told her the same thing.

 “It’s not gonna be good,”

She said the same thing she always did.

“I don’t care. You can tell me the stupidest thing ever, I just want to hear about it,”

So he swallowed, closed his eyes for a moment, and then latched onto the first idea that popped into his head.

“There’s this guy,”

“Okay, good start,”

“Shut up. There’s this guy, and he’s standing on a beach, staring at the ocean. And there’s this girl swimming there,”

“No. Don’t make it a girl, please, that’s boring,”

“Okay, it’s a guy. And the guy on the beach—“

“Name?”

“Uh—Mark. Mark has this massive crush on the guy that’s swimming—uh, Eric. And Mark is thinking about how he’s going to ask Eric out when he finally finishes swimming. But then—“

“Ah, yes, the _then_ ,”

“Let me finish the damn story, okay? Anyways, _then_ , this thing pops up out of the water. A merman. And the merman, who apparently is also in love in Eric, steals him and drags him underwater,”

“So a gay merman stole a gay man’s secret crush?”

“Exactly,”

 “Perfect. What kind of music is playing?”

“Epic music. Like, a violin symphony on steroids. And the music increases as Mark is staring at the sunset, thinking through what he’s going to do now that the love of his life is at the bottom of the ocean, when—“

Peeta went into the zone, detailing how a magic sea creature gave Mark a tail so he could swim down and rescue Eric, the battles he had with the armies of sharks below the water, the epic dual with the merman and the kiss at the end…

At some points he trailed off, or his tongue caught over words, and Katniss probably thought it was because he was gathering his thoughts, or was unsure of what would come next.

But he knew always knew exactly what would come next.

There were just better things to focus on. Like how Katniss’s hair stuck to the side of her neck, or the way the rubber soles of her sneakers curled over the top of the seat in front of her, or how she nodded her head as he spoke, like his voice was her favorite song.

When he finished, she murmured, “I told you that would be a good one,” and then kept her eyes closed, and kept nodding her head, like she was still mulling the ridiculous story line over, which in all honesty she probably was.

Peeta got up to throw away the empty popcorn bag and their drained paper cups of soda, and when he came back, she was still like that. He stood for a moment at the edge of the aisle, and in the few moments before he called her name and brought her back to earth, he tried to convince himself that it didn’t bother him that her eyes were closed, and that she couldn’t open them long enough to see on his face that she was the only thing he wanted to think about.

**V.**

_Where are you???_

Peeta shot off the text and then scrolled back though their previous messages. The last text Katniss had sent him was from two hours ago, when she’d asked him to pick her up at the end of field hockey practice, which should have ended half an hour ago.

He lifted his head and squinted through the thick layer of rain pounding down onto the field in a fruitless attempt to see anything through the haze. It had been coming down like this all afternoon. God, had she really practiced in this? Was she okay? He started to panic, images of Katniss laying facedown in the mud with a twisted ankle flashing through his brain.

Finally, he could see a small, dark figure carved out through the layer of gray, and before she was even close enough for him to make out any features, he knew it was her.

She was running pretty fast, and within a few seconds of when he had first seen her, the door to the passenger seat was being cracked open, bringing in a burst of noise from the storm outside. He caught a blur of blue and black nylon as she threw her bag in the back, and then her voice, shaky and rambling, crashed over his eardrums.

“Sorry, sorry sorry! Coach had us do another round of drills I wasn’t expecting. I tried to be fast in the locker room, but, God, it was crowded—have you been waiting long?”

He could barely focus on her words, he was so busy with taking her in.

The rain had fused the polyester of her jersey to her body, and the edges of her sports bra were showing clearly through the fabric. Her arms were puckered with goosebumps and the short wisps of hair outside her braid clung to her face. Her colors had shifted: her hair and eyes looked darker and her skin and lips had paled.

He grounded himself by looking at the dark stain her wet hair had left on her headrest, and suddenly realized he had left her sitting there, shivering, while he just _stared_ at her. His hand jerked to start the car while the words stumbled out of his mouth in an embarrassed rush.

“Jesus, don’t worry about me, look at you! You must freezing, God, here,” he reached into the backseat and shoved a thick, dark green blanket at her, which she quickly wrapped around herself.

He left his hand on her shoulder, then, without really thinking, shifted his hand from the fleece of the blanket to her skin. He tucked his hand behind her neck and her eyes opened, her pouty mouth transforming into a soft smile.

“Thank you, Peeta,”

She sat up, drawing herself away from him, and he pulled his hand away, like he had just touched fire. Which he kind of had. Only Katniss was a thousand times more dangerous than fire.

“Can you turn up the heat a little more?” she asked.

“Sure,” he leaned forward and turned the dial, “Do you want something hot to drink? Coffee or something?”

“No, it’s okay. I don’t have any cash with me anyways,”

“You ran around in the mud for an hour and a half, I think I can justify buying you two dollars’ worth of coffee,”

“Okay, then coffee sounds kind of awesome,”

He nodded and put the car in reverse, guiding it out of the parking spot, and then put it in drive and stared straight ahead, not daring to look over. If he looked over, he would probably get caught up in something stupid, like a piece of hair stuck to her ear, and crash the damn car.

He finally stopped at a gas station a few minutes away from the school and ran inside, picking up two large cups of cheap coffee for both of them. When he returned, Katniss had taken off the blanket and was dressed in new clothes: a pale gray hoodie, a pair of black yoga pants, some boots.

“Costume change?” he asked, handing her the cup.

She took it and rolled her eyes, “More like I actually remembered to throw in some extra sweats Monday night. Thank God this place is deserted, otherwise I probably would’ve flashed somebody,”

He laughed, although it sounded forced, which of course it was. Katniss had been naked, in his car. Katniss. Naked. Or practically naked. _God._

She sipped her coffee and closed her eyes, “Oh, man, this is _perfect_ ,” her eyes fluttered open lazily, and she looked over at him, “You’re a really good friend, you know that?”

“You, uh, tell me that a lot,”

“Well, you deserve to know. And you are. You really, really, are. So thank you,”

He smiled, which felt forced, just like his laugh. Friend. Right, of course. Reality was knocking at his door again.

Despite his better instincts, despite the glaring “friend” label he clearly would never shake off, he reached over and rolled her free hand in his, rubbing warmth back into her pink fingers.

He half-expected her to yank her hand away and give him a weird look, which, in all honesty, would probably tear him up inside, but she actually smiled.

“Oh, that feels nice,”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Keep going, I think they needed a defrost,”

He kept going. He rubbed each finger individually, tip first, then the first joint, then the rest. He focused on the feel of her slender fingers, the softness of her skin and the hardness of her bones.

This should have been enough. Touching her like this…he had _never_ held her hand before, not in these entire two and half years. It was incredible. He _wanted_ it to be enough.

But he kept wishing that she would look down at her fingers, at his hand, that her eyes would go up his arm and to his eyes, and for once she could see the way he looked at her, and she could understand everything, just from that one look.

Because maybe if she did, she would lean across the armrest and kiss him, and he could finally figure out exactly how vanilla chapstick tasted on her lips, and if she kissed with her mouth open or not. And after he’d learned that, she would let him climb into the backseat with her, and he would peel off her sweats and press kisses to her clammy skin, all the way down her beautiful, lithe body, until they were one twisted, heated entity.

Then, he could believe that love was real, not some unreachable, wild dream composed by screenwriters and poets, but _real_ , and it was built on math tests and candy bars and movie theaters and it could come to fruition on a rainy Tuesday afternoon in a gas station parking lot.

He knocked his head lightly against his headrest. Obviously he’d been making up too many movies lately and had forgotten he wasn’t living in one of them.

He noticed he had momentarily stopped rubbing her fingers. He went back to doing that and tried not to think about what would happen when she was finally warmed up and he had to stop.

Katniss drank her coffee and looked out the window at the raindrops colliding with the black pavement.

She didn’t look at him.


End file.
